Acting Out Trauma and Violence in Viramontes, Kingston and Silko

2003

2016

This lofty volume analyzes a circular cultural relationship: not only how trauma is reflected in cultural processes and products, but also how trauma itself acts as a critical shaper of literature, the visual and performing arts, architecture, and religion and mythmaking. The political power of trauma is seen through US, Israeli, and Japanese art forms as they reflect varied roles of perpetrator, victim, and witness. Traumatic complexities are traced from spirituality to movement, philosophy to trauma theory. And essays on authors such as Kafka, Plath, and Cormac McCarthy examine how narrative can blur the boundaries of personal and collective experience. Among the topics covered: Television: a traumatic culture. From Hiroshima to Fukushima: comics and animation as subversive agents of memory in Japan. The death of the witness in the era of testimony: Primo Levi and Georges Perec. Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism and the possibility of writing a traumatic history of religion. Placing collective trauma within its social context: the case of the 9/11 attacks. Killing the killer: rampage and gun rights as a syndrome. This volume appeals to multiple readerships including researchers and clinicians, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, and media researchers.

2006

In this essay, I want to deal with contemporary traumatic issues at play mainly in the work of Judith Butler and Leslie Marmon Silko who are, in more ways than one, theorists of trauma, though they are not officially acknowledged as such. By doing so, I want to continue the work of the few trauma theorists and writers (Cathy Caruth and Jacques Derrida among others) who have pointed out the relationships between traumatized individuals across cultures and time (without erasing the specificity of their traumas). They have done so through an analysis of problematic institutional systems of knowing, thinking, and believing that serve to produce and maintain cultural trauma, and promote, in veiled ways, cultural separation and racism. Both Butler and Silko continue this analysis in their work. In this essay, I will address, from the perspective of these two thinkers who both belong to so-called "minority groups," two historical moments (WWII and 9/11)-the performative power and ethicopolitical potential of which, work to critique nationalist discourses that promote individual and cultural trauma. I also want to point out the potential for cultural connection or reconnection between traumatized individuals and/or cultures through an analysis of the role played by death-which might seem a bit unusual-in making these connections. These conversations will help me rethink trauma outside the boundaries of conventional trauma theory, and thus bring forth new, rather localized theories of trauma. Native-American writer (and, in my books, trauma theorist) Leslie Marmon Silko's treatment of trauma in her two novels Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead supersedes the wellknown theories about trauma developed by contemporary figures such as Jacques Lacan or Nebula 3.2-3, September 2006 Croisy: Re-imagining Healing after Trauma… 87 Cathy Caruth. In her texts, Silko brings forth the historical value of the cultural metaphor of the web (a crucial symbol in Laguna cosmology) to assert the non-singularity of trauma's representability, the interdependency of certain traumatic stories and traumatized bodies, the building or rebuilding of connections between these traumatized bodies through a critique of dangerous systematic and symbolic interventions in the healing process, and the redefinition of death as a new starting point (though a rather morbid one) in the process of building human connections (with one's own lost cultural matrix or between enemy cultures). In short, Silko participates in the process of rethinking and reshaping trauma theory. As mentioned above, another important theorist of trauma comes to join Silko in my forthcoming critique of conventional trauma theory and its processes: Judith Butler, who is better known as a queer theorist than a theorist of trauma. The juxtaposition of the work of queer theorist Judith Butler and the work of Native fiction writer Leslie Marmon Silko might appear as an unlikely combination for the connection between these authors is not obvious. However, this juxtaposition is crucial to my project since I want to participate in the process of connectionmaking between cultural and political entities that have remained separated. These two writers of trauma have never been linked to each other; they are not quoted nor simply mentioned in the same literary or theoretical spaces; and they have not been associated directly to the field of trauma studies but can do much to widen the scope of that field. Here, I am only making visible an already existing connection between two areas, and more specifically two authors (Butler and Silko) who are promoting a connection between cultural groups-in their respective dealings with trauma. Butler and Silko are important contemporary theorists of trauma because, in the texts I will be analyzing, both authors critique the ways in which certain systems of thinking or believing Nebula 3.2-3, September 2006 Croisy: Re-imagining Healing after Trauma… 88 defined as universal/transhistorical (not to say ahistorical), as well as the symbols that are contained within these systems, can do much damage to an individual, a community, a nation victim of trauma. When I address the issue of trauma, when I write about its characteristics, representations, consequences, etc., I do so "in context." A trauma is specific and localized and needs specific and localized responses; it needs cures that take into account that specificity and locality. Already known universalized and Eurocentric metropolitan trauma theories and curative practices cannot become the imposed uncritical answer (though they can participate in thinking through that answer, that cure) to a problem that is localized elsewhere (not in Europe, not in the metropolitan theoretical centers). Butler addresses this issue in the context of 9/11, and Silko addresses it in the context of the Native-American involvement in WWII. Not only do both authors bring forward the need to think about traumas in terms of their connectedness to each other in order to foster cultural understanding, but they also write against any universal, symbolic system of knowledge that presents itself as the cure for a very specific, localized trauma. Both authors redefine ways of coping with trauma that move away from the popular systematic responses to trauma we know (medical, governmental and religious interventions are probably making the loudest and more brusque statements about what the responses to a trauma should be). Both authors, in rather morbid ways, see death as a connecting point between individuals and cultures that have learned to hate a constructed enemy that should not be one. Both authors provoke nationalist trauma narratives and deconstruct the racist lies that compose these narratives, in more or less veiled ways.